2 minute read
Crash Victim Thankful for PPE
By Lt. Scott Gardner
With dinner and a movie behind us, my wife and I had started home on our motorcycles. We both were in the right-hand lane of an access road to an interstate, riding in a stagger formation. I was in the right-hand part of the lane, and my wife was about a car-length behind, in the left half of the lane.
As we approached the interstate, the access road curved to the left, followed by a short, straight stretch and then an even sharper curve to the left. I realized I was running wide when we entered the sharpest part of the curve and instinctively applied the brakes to slow down. This action caused the bike to upright itself and straighten out, which, in turn, caused me to run even wider toward the outside of the lane. I leaned the bike back over to try and recover the turn, but I was in roadside gravel and debris by this time. I ended up sliding into the adjacent guardrail.
This guardrail was about two feet high, with two continuous beams of metal fastened to uprights every few feet. I almost was parallel to the guardrail when I hit it, so my right leg was crushed between the rail and my bike. I flipped over the rail into a grassy lot, and my bike bounced back into traffic. According to my wife, who had a perfect view of the whole incident, I flew about 15 feet in the air and landed “like a rag doll.”
My wife called an ambulance to take me to the hospital and kept me from moving around and making my injuries worse. She had a good idea of my injuries as soon as she saw me, but I didn’t find out until later. I had dislocated three bones in my right hand, torn the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my right knee, sheared off the end of my right thighbone where it joined my knee, and sustained a dozen or so fractures between my right ankle and knee.
Several of the leg fractures were compound breaks that had penetrated my skin and my jeans. I underwent about eight hours of surgery after admission to the hospital and remained there for the next 10 days.
My days after returning home were filled with painkillers, doctors’ appointments, and physical therapy. I spent the first month in a wheelchair, then progressed to a walker—one
